What are Zil lanes?

If you live in London, a little bit of Soviet Russia will be coming down your way during next year’s Olympics. Not the oversized shotputters of dubious sexual provenance who used to clean up on the gold medals in the female events, or, at the other end of the scale, the dainty gymnasts whose bodies were also sacrificed in the pursuit of honouring Communism.

No, what we will be getting are Zil lanes. More than a hundred miles of them, stretching from Heathrow to Stratford in east London and Wembley in the north-west. Zil lanes are sections of the road ruled out of bounds during the Olympic weeks to all but the structurally dysfunctional so-called ‘Olympic family’.

Zil cars were the stonking great black, shiny, steel behemoths used by the Russian nomenklatura when the Red Flag flew over the Kremlin, and they had access to special lanes to enable their occupants to reach their offices faster than the proletariat they were supposed to serve. Of course they needn’t have bothered , since the regime barely allowed private car ownership and the roads were virtually car-free.

Not surprisingly, irreverent Londoners have dubbed them Zil lanes, a name that has stuck in preference to the official description ‘special games lanes’ . In Soviet Russia, the Communist leaders were never called upon to explain their inherent contradiction, given that all men and women were supposedly equal, and not surprisingly Boris Johnson, Lord Coe and Tessa Jowell have been just as reticent about why these privileges have been accorded to a dubious bunch of VIPs and hangers- on. The best Boris could come up with recently was that he was seeking to avoid ‘the reputational catastrophe that engulfed Atlanta’ at the 1996 games when athletes found themselves stuck in traffic jams in a city that had little public transport.

London, though, is blessed with an excellent public transport system that could easily accommodate most of the ‘family’. However, as part of the Olympic bid, Coe and his mates declared that Stratford was only 25 minutes from the swanky hotels of Park Lane, forgetting to mention that the distance could be covered in this time only by breaking the speed limit and never stopping at a red light.

So guess, what? Not only will the ‘family’ have access to Zil lanes, but the even less equal among them, the elite in the 240 chauffeur-driven BMW limousines specially reserved for the ultra VIPs, will find their cars have been fitted, at a cost to the taxpayer of £12 million, with sensors that quite literally turn the lights from red to green.

Meanwhile, ordinary motorists and cyclists who mistakenly wander into a Zil lane will be spotted on CCTV and find themselves liable to a fixed penalty of £200.

While few would begrudge the athletes being given special treatment, they won’t be needing the lanes as they’ll be housed in the Olympic village in Stratford. The 80,000 members of the ‘family’ who will be haring across London jumping the lights will be a bunch of petty royals and tinpot politicians, not to mention the kleptomaniac Sepp Blatters of this world, few of whom ever donned a pair of Nike trainers in their lives.

Not surprisingly the people most up in arms about the proposed London Zil lanes are the black cab drivers. If the Mayor or the sporting authorities had an ounce of sense, they would have long bought them off by allowing them to use the lane too , but presumably they must have thought that would be the thin edge of the wedge and in no time at all we’d have peers of the realm or even MPs clamouring for access. As Simon Jenkins suggested in the Evening Standard, it’s almost as if the politicians and the sports administrators actively want to foment revolution.

Roym

i feel some civil disobedience could be called for

Greg Tingey

Coe is an exceptionally unpleasant crawler
He has personal associates who are or were (some of them, I’m glad to say, are now dead) fascists.
Yes, real actual fascists – look up J. A. Samaranch, for instance.
But then, the whole vile school-sports thing reeks of “Kraft durch Freude” anyway.
Contrary to the press/politicians hype, most Londoners resent the games, resent the expense, and just want to get on with their lives.

However: DISSENT IS NOT PERMITTED, and we were always at war with Eastasia, weren’t we?

Greg Tingey

P.S. I note that you leave out the spurious horific.
“Lord” implies honour, and Coe, as a fascist crawler, has no honour.
Well done!

Christian Wolmar

Actually, we were at war alternatively with Eastasia and Oceania. Orwell was so spot on — remarkable how once the Iron Curtain opened up, we then rapidly launched a war against Muslim extremists. It almost makes one believe in conspiracy theories

I think, if you re-read Orwell’s 1984, it was war alternatively with Eastasia and Eurasia. Also, are you really believing the conspiracy theories over the 2001 hijackings and 2005 London bombings?

Christian Wolmar

no, don’t get me wrong, I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I really like David Aaaronovitch’s book debunking them. But it is as if we really need an enemy all the time…The end of the Cold War should have been an opportunity to divert spending away from the military, but thanks to Muslim extremism – whose threat and extent is actually greatly exaggerated and, indeed, stimulated by our response to incidents – we are still permanently ‘at war’ which is precisely the state that Orwell described so presciently.

Len

How will they try to ensure cyclists don’t use the lanes? Certainly not numberplate recognition! Face on cameras won’t work for motorcyclists either. And if you’re in a car with Romanian plates, the chances are a ticket will go to someone else. (Romanian numberplates have the same format as Great Britain has).

First class comments about VIP? lanes for the Olympic bird brains. Will politicians never get it right? Please don’t start me off on this five ring circus business!

Albert Beale

You can be sure that plenty of cyclists will be in the Zil Lanes, since the alternative would be to cycle in the thick of the lorries and so on which will be diverted into the bus/bike lanes to make way for the Zil lanes. And I have no intention of paying £200 in order to try to avoid being mown down on my travels. Though maybe the Olympic Occupiers – given that they can make up their own laws for the occasion – are planning preventive detention too?
And I’m sure it won’t be just individual cyclists … there are certainly plans for mass bike rides in the lanes…

Wayoutwest

I was at a recent presentation where TFL tried to say these routes “are not Zil lanes” and that “anyone can use them”. What they did not make abundantly clear is that almost all slip roads and turn-offs are going to be blocked off, so….join them by all means, as long as you are aware that you can only go to Stratford, Wembley etc once you join them!!

Albert Beale

If TfL mean that others can use those _roads_ – well, yes, but not the Zil lanes themselves. You get fined £200 (I think it is) if your tyres enter the Fatcat Lane. I asked – at a local police-community consultative meeting the other night (where residents of the London Borough of Camden were more or less warned to leave the country for a month in the summer if we didn’t want to be trapped in our homes by millions of visitors) – what the fine was for cyclists. They didn’t know. But whatever it is, it certainly isn’t going to stop many cyclists from using them, anyway!
Albert Beale

I think both Christian and Paul have missed the point with regards to Greg Tingey’s comment that ” we were always at war with Eastasia, weren’t we?”
In 1984, Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Eurasia was our ally. And when the three-way tug-of-war shifts, the likes of Winston Smith burns a few newspapers and redacts a few others, and hey presto! We have always been at war with Eurasia, and Eastasia has always been our ally.

TomPapworth

Hmm… That reply should have appeared BELOW those of Christian and Paul.